Guest review by Graeme Fife: IN PARENTHESIS by David Jones

"I have never read so moving and richly coloured an evocation of the sounds and perpetuum mobile of life in the trenches ... nothing more immediate, chaotic, provoking."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history, four studies of the mountain ranges of southern Europe and, like many of us, waits with the patience of Job for decision on a number of manuscripts.

In Parenthesis grew out of the seven months between December 1915 and the Battle of the Somme. Its seven parts trace the journey of a unit of the Royal Welch Fusiliers with whom Jones served from embarkation to France and the grim fighting in Mametz Wood. However, although rooted in the experience of an individual soldier, John Ball, and his fellow privates, it concerns itself more with the minutiae of their life than with the horror of their death. Indeed, Jones said that although ‘it happens to be concerned with war, I should prefer it to be about a good kind of peace,’ in part, thereby, explaining the title of the work, the war itself being a sort of brackets within which they existed and out of which they were glad to step.

The style of this essentially poetic work is complex but not baffling, even if the literary cross references, the passages of demotic language, the peppering with slang, the evocation of particularly Welsh myth, in the epic poem Y Gododdin, and Arthurian legend, call for author’s notes, much in the way they were deployed by T.S. Eliot.

  

I have never read so moving and richly coloured an evocation of the sounds and perpetuum mobile of life in the trenches, the constant nag of military orders, discipline, parades, longueurs of the army routine. And the cheery and scabrous joshing of the men subject to it. I’ve read nothing more immediate, chaotic, provoking. By scattered image, staccato interjection, wild allusion, literary reference, word painting, it startles and surprises constantly. Of course I miss much – to slow my reading to the pace of chasing each conundrum would be to lose the pace of the narrative’s onward push, the relentless current, but the impression sticks. And the impression, of men drawn into a plight which mirrors, somehow, in extremis, the human condition in any circumstance, is of deep humanity and what Jones called ‘the extreme tenderness of men in action to each other’. This is something rather more than camaraderie, though such is obvious, largely in the humorous banter with which the text is sprinkled. Of a wounded comrade-in-arms: ‘Nothing is impossible nowadays my dear if only we can get the poor bleeder through the barrage and they take as much trouble with the ordinary soldiers you know…Lift gently Dai, gentleness befits his gun-shot wound…go easy – easee at the slope – and mind him…’

These men, drawn from worlds apart, from Wales to Bromley-by-Bow, have their counterparts in the misted past of ancient battles fought in these islands for whom the elegies of the ancient Welsh poems were written. They have their shades in the Arthurian knights, and in that continuum of human courage, of suffering, of simply making do, they unite the theme of compassion: the sacrificial lamb, the goat cast into the wilderness to bear the burden of guilt, the vast multitude of the men along the Western Front who ‘lie still under the oak / next to the Jerry / and Sergeant Jerry Coke…’ that play on the two senses of Jerry underlining the pity of this conflict.

I’d liken the language and the eccentric pointing of its punctuation, rich in its shifts of tone – jocular and even scurrilous here, exalted here, matter of fact here, a sudden descant of military terms and indicators, numbers and letters, largely incomprehensible without the maps but curiously comic – to a symphonic score. The language of music is not generally susceptible to explanation, not logical, but it has a suggestive power which Jones echoes in his blending of elements of a voice which speaks direct as well as in passionate digression and ornament:

‘But sweet sister death has gone debauched today and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling of her appetite but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered.’

But: ‘…who gives a bugger for the Dolorous Stroke.’ This last an allusion to the wound inflicted on the guardian of the Holy Grail by a mystic weapon, counterpart to the spear which despatches Christ on the Cross.

This is a world where mundane details of a sort of substratum of mortal existence plays out, subject to the rules and regulations of the army, often needless, meaningless, plain daft – ‘groundsheet not to protrude under pack more than two inches’ – but where, nevertheless, an innate nobility holds, a nobility which extends beyond the imperatives of this sordid business of waiting in water-filled trenches to visit death upon those who wait to visit death on you.

‘The relief elbows him on the fire-step: All quiet china? – bugger all to report? – kipping mate? – Christ, mate – you’ll have them all over.’

In Parenthesis is published by Faber & Faber.